'Freehold NJ' on Serious Eats

It's named Federici's Italian Restaurant, but you come here for the pizza. Folks from the Freehold, New Jersey, area have been doing so since 1946, when brothers Dante Federici and Frank "Spat" Federici Jr. returned from WWII and joined their parents in the family business. With their mother, they put pizza on the restaurant's menu, which had been in operation in some form or other since 1921 (first as a billiard parlor that served food, then as a bar with food, then a full-blown restaurant). The place looks like it never really shook the bar vibe and remains a bit of a throwback to the loungey '70s. Not that that's a bad thing. When you walk into a place like this, you hope they haven't done anything to "update" (read "screw up") the pizza in the intervening years. More